If you're in need of a meatier, stronger, more impressive hard drive, Seagate …

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Seagate announced three new high-capacity hard drives today, setting capacity records in both the desktop and mobile segments. The new Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB HDD is 50 percent larger than the 1TB desktop drives available today, while the 500GB Momentus drives (available in 5400rpm and 7200rpm flavors) are 56 percent larger than the current high-capacity 320GB 2.5" laptop drives.

Apart from their size, the new drives are fairly ordinary; performance should be in line with previous Seagate products and comparably-specced drives from other vendors. The Momentus 5400.6 is a 2.5" mobile drive aimed at consumers who value higher battery life and lower noise; the drive offers 8MB of cache and will be available in capacities ranging from 120-500GB. The 7200.4, as the name suggests, targets the high-performance end of the magnetic drive market, and ships with 16MB of cache.

As for the 7200.11, it'll slot in at the top of that product family. The main difference between the new 1.5TB drive and the 1TB ST31000340AS already available is their platter density. Both disks are four-platter designs, but the 1TB drive uses four 250GB platters, while the new 1.5TB is apparently using four 375GB platters. 375GB seems a bit odd for a platter size, but we've seen multiple manufacturers pushing above 250GB in recent months; Samsung's new 1TB Speedpoint F1 drives now use three 333GB platters instead of the original 4x250GB configuration the drive first shipped with.

Seagate's announcement today is actually the first desktop capacity boost since Hitachi launched the 7K1000 1TB back in early 2007. We'll undoubtedly see announcements from other vendors in the not-too-distant future, as multiple companies scramble to jump on the terabyte-plus bandwagon. We could see modest increases through the end of the year, but 2TB before 2009 is a toss-up. 500GB platters are probably still a ways away, and while a 5x400GB platter configuration would do the trick, the first generation 1TB five platter drives tended to run hotter and noisier than the units that the followed.

The flip side of that particular coin, of course, is the steadily dropping price of solid state drive (SSD) technology. Many hard drive manufacturers have announced SSD products, including Seagate, but any company with a significant investment in magnetic storage technology will need to keep that segment profitable, even if they intend to move to SSD products in the long term. Since magnetic drives have no real chance of matching SSD speeds long term (especially in the mobile market), manufacturers will have to find ways to continue ramping drive size to keep the cost-per-gigabyte of an HDD far lower than that of an SSD. For the moment, hard drives are in no danger, but the SSD threat isn't simply going to go away.